Roberta Schaefer: Scholars have begun to expose 1619 Project and CRT as dangerous frauds – Worcester Telegram

Roberta Schaefer| Telegram & Gazette

Suppose your first-grader came home from school and announced that he had been asked to deconstruct his racial and sexual identity and rank himself according to his power and privilege. That occurred in a Cupertino, California,elementary school.

Or imagine learning that your fifth-gradersclass in Philadelphia celebratedBlack communism, with the students directed to hold a Black Power rally in class to free 1960sMarxist radical Angela Davis from prison, where she had been held on charges of murder.

Is this what you expect your child to be learning in the primary grades or any grade? Welcome to the world where critical race theory(CRT) is being implemented in multitudinousways in all the institutions that affect our daily livespublic and private schools, universities, corporations, and government at every level.

What exactly is CRT, which has swept the nation like a tsunami since the death of George Floyd? The theory is an outgrowth of 19th century Marxism, which maintains that the primary characteristic of free-market, industrial societies is the exploitation of workers by capitalists. Eventually, the theory runs, workers will rebel, overthrow the capitalists, seize control of the means of production, and establish a proletarian dictatorship that culminates in a communist utopia.

As all Americans should be aware, the Marxist revolutions or coups that took place during the 20th century in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodiaand elsewhere culminated not in any such paradise, but rather in totalitarian dictatorships, mass poverty, and the extermination of over 100 million people.

Meanwhile, Americans as a whole enjoyed a steadily growing standard of living, and despite a legacy of racial discrimination that survived well past the abolition of slavery (156 years ago), that increasing prosperity, as the African-American social scientist Thomas Sowell has documented, included black citizens, even before the civil rights legislation of 1964-65.

These facts nonetheless did not deter the inventors of critical race theory, including Harvard law professor Derrick Bell in the 1990s and (more recently) the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Movement, Patrice Cullors,from adapting Marxist doctrine to race relations in America, professing to see in it the explanation for all the sufferings of black people since the era of slavery, and the cure in some combination of admittedly racist domination by black people over whites, to compensate for the prior history of white racism, and the rest of Marxs program.(Along the way, the theorys advocates entirely ignore the radical oppression of Blacks by the white rulers of todays Cuba.)

Asone of the foremost opponents of CRT, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Rufo, has observed,its advocates use a set of euphemisms to camouflage the theorys real meaning: equity, social justice, diversity and inclusion, culturally responsive teaching.

Equity, for instance, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality.The distinction, however, is all-important.CRT theorists reject the principle of equal rights, as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Civil War, and enshrined in law by the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They dismiss that principles entailment of mere nondiscrimination as a cover for white supremacy, patriarchyand oppression.

Equity, by contrast, as defined by CRT theorists, is a reformulation of Marxism. As explained byUCLA law professor and CRT proponent Cheryl Harris, equity requires the suspension of private property rights, the seizure of land and wealth, and their redistribution along racial lines.

Similarly rejecting Constitutional, republican government, IIbram Kendi, author of How to be an Antiracist and director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, has called for a federal Department of Antiracism that would be independent of the elected branches of government and would have the power to nullify any law and censor any speech of political leaders and private citizens that are found to be insufficiently antiracist.

It would also require abolishing the free enterprise system, since according to Kendi in order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anticapitalist. (Kendi charges $20,000 for a one-hour lecture on such themes. Talk about privilege!)

In sum, government based on equity as defined by CRT rather than equality means not only the end of private property, but the termination of individual rights, equality under the law, federalismand freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discriminationand omnipotent bureaucratic authority. The principles of the Declaration of Independence and the structure of our Constitution would be entirely overthrown, in favor of a dictatorship of self-defined and unaccountable antiracists.

It should be noted that the goals of CRT are entirely compatible with the premises of the New York Times 1619 Project, which has already been adopted for classroom use in several thousand American schools. As the Projectsprimary author, Nicole Hannah-Jones (who lacks any advanced degree in history), Americas real founding occurred not in 1776, but 1619, when the first African slaves arrived in Virginia.

The project claims that the Revolutionary War was fought mainly to preserve Americas slavocracy, and Americas success politically, economically, and culturally is due entirely to its subjugation of Blacks. Without any supporting evidence, Hannah-Jones denies that the reference to human equality in the Declaration was intended to refer to Black people, despite a welter of evidence (including from Thomas Jefferson and John Adams) to the contrary.

Despite the fact that the claims of the 1619 Project have been overwhelmingly refuted by leading American historians (Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz and James McPherson, among others), the spread of the 1619 Projects curriculum is being used to delegitimize Americas core principles and institutions in the eyes of children who dont know any better often taught by teachers who have been ordered to inculcate the projects doctrines, typically with little challenge or counterpart. (Of course, those in charge of the project have no explanation of why so many millions of persons of color, from Africa, South and Central America, and Asia seek so desperately to immigrate to this supposed bastion of racial oppression each year.)

Fortunately, leading scholars, both Black and white, have begun to expose the 1619 Project and CRT more generally as the dangerous fraud that they are. Robert Woodson, for one, a longtime African-American activist who directs a national network of community-based programs that have greatly improved the lives of the Black underclass, has initiated his own 1776 project to counter what he calls a false and fatalistic narrative: The Timess negative message is dangerous to the future because it discourages Blacks from trying, and nothing is more lethal than a good excuse for failing.His project is designed to be aspirational and inspirational.

If Americas glorious system of freedom and opportunity for all is to be saved from ruin by vicious demagogues and their gullible acolytes, we shall need a thousand more Woodsons along with millions of parents and tens of millions more citizens who take a serious interest in what our children are being taught.

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Roberta Schaefer: Scholars have begun to expose 1619 Project and CRT as dangerous frauds - Worcester Telegram